The Winged Beast
by cywol
Summary: Surrounded by memories, Joel and Ellie travel farther into the forest. *Rating is for language - guess whose?*


The ground was hard underfoot, and the air in the forest seemed far too thick and heavy for autumn. An amber August light lay dappled across the path, bringing with it the kind of heat that Joel had always thought reserved for rare summer evenings. He had vague memories of such things – little more than tiny fragments of a tapestry which he had long ago discarded – but had never thought to experience them again. In sleepy suburbia, he would have spent an evening like this out on the porch with an iced drink, swilling the cubes around the glass and waiting for the stars to come out.

Those times had come and gone, and he knew that they would not return in his lifetime.

Ellie stumbled over a moss-covered root, clutching at the tree's trunk for balance even as she cursed it with words that even Joel had never heard before. The path which they were taking through the forest was overgrown with weeds and wildflowers, and submerged beneath a dense layer of browning leaves. It had lost any semblance of structure a long time ago.

"You see that, Joel?" Ellie called. "These fucking things keep grabbing at me!"

"Be careful," he grunted, by way of a response.

Still cussing under her breath, Ellie forged ahead, pushing low-hanging branches out of her way with undue force. Joel watched her closely, noting the savagery with which she was struggling through the undergrowth. She had been more subdued since the dam, but that was natural. This, however, was new.

"Ellie."

If she heard him, she gave no sign of having done so, her frenzied attack against the wilderness continuing unabated.

"Ellie, you're making noise."

"Oh, screw the noise, Joel!"

She turned and glared at him, blinking aggrievedly at him through layers of dirt and sweat. Her brow was furrowed and her hands had formed tiny fists at her sides. She looked angry, and tired, but there was frustration there as well. As he stared at her impassively, she took a step towards him, her small feet crunching in the dead leaves.

"It's been fucking months since we've seen anything! I'm so fucking… fucking sick of this shit, Joel!"

It was petulant, and the less said of it the better. He stared purposefully over her shoulder.

"We should get going," he stated. There was nothing else to say.

"NO! FUCK!"

Ellie dropped to the floor, slamming the heels of her hands into her forehead. For a single, alarming moment, Joel thought that she had started to cry.

"It ain't my fault that it's hot, Ellie," he pointed out, leaning against a nearby tree. "But there wasn't nothing left at the dam. We had to leave. All we've got to go on is what Tommy left us."

Two reproachful eyes glared at him over a pair of clenched fists. He met them levelly with his own, hoping that she would see sense in time for them to make a little more ground before the night was upon them.

"It's not… that." She sighed, and her eyes dropped from his to stare at the forest floor. "It's just… it's been ages since anything happened. Fuck, I wouldn't even mind it if we ran into a Clicker! It must have been fucking _weeks_ since we've even seen any infected, and even then it was only that old guy who couldn't even move!"

"You want to see some infected?"

His voice was even and measured, but she shot him another glare.

"I don't mean it like… like that. It's just…"

He waited, staring at her impassively. She was crushing leaves with both of her hands, but her eyebrows were drawn together as if she was in deep concentration. Her red t-shirt had stuck to her shoulders, so he could see that they were slumped. Abruptly, he realised why she had been oddly withdrawn today, the epiphany bringing with it a pang of guilt and fear.

"You're lonely," he said simply. Her eyes snapped to his again, the briefest of flashes of panic passing across them.

"What? No, fuck, that's not it! I- I mean I'm with you, anyway…"

"It ain't right for a kid like you to be around someone like me all the time," he observed, resolutely ignoring the painful chord saying it aloud struck in his chest. "You should be in school, with friends of your own age." He looked away, drawn to add, "It ain't exactly easy for me, knowing that and seeing you getting older. I wish I knew what to do, but I don't."

"I don't need friends my own age!" she spat vehemently, leaping to her feet. "Fucking hell, Joel! I'm just tired, that's all. And fucking hot!"

There was just a little too much force to her glare, just a little too much swearing, and her voice was pitched just a little too high. They were small changes – inaudible and invisible to a casual observer – but to Joel they were as obvious as the shafts of fading sunlight sloping down through the dense treetop canopy. Ellie had already turned away by the time he leant off the trunk, and this time she affected a calm demeanour as she continued ahead. He was not fooled.

So she was lonely. Well, that was no surprise. Even in the days before the plague, he would not have wanted to spend all day everyday with his father, and that was close to what he was to her. Unscrewing his metal hip flask, he went through the motion of checking his water levels, and then took a brief mental inventory of his weapons and ammo. It was a monotonous task, but he tried to do it as often as possible. One bullet left lingering carelessly in a top pocket could be the difference between life and death.

She was right, he realised belatedly, halfway through. The thought simultaneously surprised and alarmed him. It had been months since they had seen a Clicker, and it must have been at least a year since they had seen a Bloater. They had seen corpses, sure, but most had been rotting harmlessly, whether by the side of some middle-of-nowhere road or slumped against the slatted door of some abandoned barn. Joel was not sure what to make of it, but it stopped him in his tracks for a moment. He had heard stories of the infection struggling to survive in certain areas before, but had never encountered such a place himself. They had always sounded like a myth; on a kin with mirages or Shangri-La. He had never believed the tales.

Unbidden, some words leapt to the forefront of his mind. They were old words, spoken in a voice echoing from only God knows where. They were dead words, words that reminded him of his own foolishness and failure. Tess's words.

_Nothing lives forever, Joel, not even this plague. Hell, if you keep talking like that, you're going to turn me into a pessimist._

He could not help the gruff chuckle that escaped his lips, but managed to pass it off as a light cough. Tess. That was one of the dullest, most sapping pains.

"Stay alert," he muttered, scanning the verges of the path for activity.

"I know."

But they saw nothing for the rest of the day except the trees of the forest, waves of heat shimmering amid the boughs, and by the time they made camp for the night all sound seemed to have drained out of the world. Shadows darkened the forest, and there was some fungus stretched across the trees, but no malicious presences lingered nearby. He and Ellie might have been the only two people on the face of the earth.

All the while, Joel found that he could not keep Tess's words out of his mind. It might have been more than twenty years since the outbreak, but he had never before felt such a stillness in the air, nor sensed such finality in a silence. There was something strange about that evening, and it was a feeling that he was certain he would remember for as long as he lived. When the stars came out, and Ellie was deeply asleep, he sat up and listened, certain that at any moment he would hear the tell-tale noises of an approaching horror.

None came. The night passed, and the longer he sat there in the black, beneath that starlit sky, the louder the old words seemed to resonate within his head. It was a different Tess that spoke this time, and he could still see her in front of him if he closed his eyes, see her slumped and defeated with her hands on her head, sitting against the base of a concrete wall as she hid her tears. The night had been upon them both then, too, but they had not been accustomed to it.

_Nobody will remember us. The buildings will be covered, and our bodies will wither away. We will leave nothing of us behind, and we will never return. It will be slow, but it will happen. We are all going into the darkness, one by one._

When the morning came, Joel saw afresh the trees which he had only glimpsed in the evening.

The fungus which he had seen the night before hung from many of them, shrivelled and withered as if it had baked in the sun. In places, it had begun to crumble, scattering flakes of itself upon the parched earth. There were no spores, and there was no threat. It looked feeble, old. Joel stared at it for a long time, watching as the wind picked up the flakes and scattered them on the breeze like ash or smoke. Ellie sighed in her sleep, but he could not tear his eyes away from the drooping remnants of scorched mycelium by which they were almost completely surrounded.

He had seen enough of death to recognise its cold touch. Death, the wanderer who had ridden into this land on the back of the plague, whose face could be seen in the eyes of every foul creature which it had spawned. Death had ridden the plague, but he had turned upon his steed.

Ravaged by death, the fungus droops forlornly from the trees. In its withered form, Joel sees the abyss; the precipice into which mankind might have fallen. Man has stumbled into a thousand darknesses, but only the fungus is falling.

On the wings of death, the plague plummets. By that which it brought, it has been borne away.


End file.
